Teong Tan has been active since 1998 in designing solar cookers. He is the inventor of the DATS solar cooker, a homemade cardboard cooker that serves as a modified parabola. He is also the inventor of the Suntastic panel cooker, a portable solar cooker made from folding a used cardboard box. He has taught 20 people to use solar cookers as of mid-2004. In early 2008, he designed the Fun-Panel cooker. The Fun-Panel cooker is a portable solar cooker that is based on the design of the solar funnel cooker. Most of the solar cookers that Teong H. Tan designs can be made with simple materials like aluminum foil, glue, and a used cardboard box. Also most of his designs are capable of cooking without a greenhouse enclosure. In many of his cookers, an effort is made to make the cooker portable. Teong resides in Singapore, a country in South East Asia. He can easily be contacted through his website below and by email.

Teong writes of himself, "I was born in Taiping, a small town in Malaysia. I had an easy and simple life while growing up in Taiping where I spent most of my weekends helping my parents out in the farm. I was also very active as a boy scout and did a lot of camping, hiking and swimming. I went to Canada to further my studies when I was 19. Canada was a culture shock for me because I went to a Chinese school in Malaysia where English was my third language. I completed my Grade 13 in Brantford, Ontario and went on to study Mechanical Engineering (Option in Aeronautical Engineering) at McGill University in Montreal. I have always liked airplanes and have decided very early on that I would pursue this field. While at McGill, I was required to work on a heat transfer experiment at the Brace Research Institute in my final year. It was at Brace Research Institute that I first came across a few solar cookers that were being designed as an alternate cooking method for people facing fuel wood shortages. Those solar cookers left a great impression on me, and I read everything I could get my hands on about solar cooking at Brace.

After graduating from McGill in 1984, I moved to Singapore to work as an engineer for Singapore Airlines. I became a Field Service Representative for Pratt & Whitney in 1994, providing technical support regarding aircraft engines to various airlines in the Far East region. In this job, I worked and lived in Kuala Lumpur for five years, Shanghai for four year, and then Guangzhou for two years before returning to Singapore in 2005. I am married with a daughter and a son. My family travelled with me on all my assignments. In 1998, while surfing the Internet, I stumbled upon the Solar Cooking Archive, which rekindled my interest in solar cooking after a long break. Upon trying out a few homemade solar cookers, I realized that people would be more likely to give solar cooking a chance if it is simple and easy to do. Being an engineer, I felt that I should be able to do something about that, and since then I have acquired a new hobby in designing simple solar cookers and making improvements to existing solar cooker designs. I share what I have learned or came up with through Solar Cookers International, an organization that I felt is best positioned and established to help disseminate solar cooking information and knowledge. So far, it has been very rewarding for me just knowing that other people are finding good use for the simple solar cookers that I have created because they were easy to construct and use."